Thursday, June 17, 2004

June Scapes

Every vegetarian should have neighbors like Jane and George, whose meticulously tended garden has yielded our most exciting culinary finds this year. Tonight, George introduced us to the wonders of garlic scapes, those elegant swirls and seedpods that develop atop hard-neck garlic stalks in June.

Thanks to those scapes, we dined tonight on one of the best pestos we've had in months. (And that's saying a lot, since we regularly make fresh pesto from our basil plants.) Scape pesto is smooth and flavorful, but in a subtle, garlicky-lemony way.

We used a mini-chopper to combine the scapes and olive oil, which turned a brilliant, if watery-looking, green. We blended this by hand with the fresh-grated (hard) mozzarella and poured it over angel-hair pasta, which we then garnished with toasted pine nuts, olives, and fresh tomatoes.

Garlic scape pesto apparently freezes well. Not that we'd know, since we reluctantly turned over the remaining portion to Jane and George. Sigh. It was the right thing to do. But, as God is my witness, my June diet henceforth will be heavy on the scapes.

P.S. If you don't have generous, gardening neighbors, you can still get garlic scapes at the farmer's market or food co-op. (And probably some grocery stores, too.) For more neat garlic scape recipes, visit this site.

Oooohhhh, yes. I bought these at the farmer's market this morning without a clue of what to do with them. Luckily, I stumbled across this recipe! Holy smokes, garlicky, rich but light, so springy! I used the pesto over penne, used pinenuts, olives and cherry tomatoes as you suggested, and then a little fresh basil because I had it around. Paired it with a simple sauted tilapia. A wonderful meal! Thank you!

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